Man knows no bounds when it comes to pondering his existence, mortality, and the grandiose concept of time because existential contemplations are his favorite pastime. Man has always felt compelled to insert his own significance into the overarching universality of things that almost every culture, across times and civilizations, had created a similarly-structured existence story to tell.
The Greeks parred human existence into five “Ages”. In the first Golden Age, man lived among Gods where peace and harmony prevailed, the earth provided in abundance, and with his youth intact, he lived well into his old age. In the Silver Age, life was still grand and remarkable, but man crossed the Gods and had to work the earth a bit for his sustenance. In the subsequent Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages, man’s luck ran out and his existence followed the downward slope of a bell curve in terms of the quality of his life.
The Jains had a comparable layout with six cycles of time where in the first period, man grew to be six miles tall, ate only every fourth day, lived free of the seven sins, and had wish-fulfilling trees called “Kalpavriksha” that granted all of his worldly wishes. In the subsequent cycles, he progressively lost a few miles of his height, ate more frequently, irked the gifting trees into denying his wishes, and saw a general lapse in happiness, religion, virtues, and goodness.
Christians kept things simple with their version of the Six Ages that align with our present history where the first age started with Adam while the last age will end with the Second Coming of Christ. Given that the sweet Jesus of Nazareth was skewered on the cross in the fifth age, you can guess how well the sixth and present age is bearing on us.
Even J.R.R. Tolkien imagined a creation myth for his fictional Middle Earth that followed the general arc of conception to conflict.
But if you have to give it up to one group for their commitment to the cause, for drawing the most meticulous timekeeping chart with the precise and proportionate calculation for each time period, for creating a nuanced creation story imbued with both philosophy and cosmology, and for the sheer pizzazz with which they own it all, it will have to be the Hindus.
According to them, time turns in cycles, each 4,320,000 years long with every cycle containing four “yuga” or ages of time that follow the same pattern of grand existence to Godless anarchy. The first yuga that is 1,728,000 years long would have 100 percent righteousness, the second yuga that is 1,296,000 years long would have 75 percent righteousness, and so on. As each yuga progresses, it gets reduced in length and human morality by exactly one-fourth in a precise 4:3:2:1 ratio like an ominous countdown to self-annihilation. The yuga cycle moves like the minute hand on the grand cosmic clock face ticking away through constellations, stars, and the precession of the equinoxes representing the cyclical upward and downward trends in man’s perception and awareness.
Even the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan admired the Indians’ idea of a cosmic cycle in relation to the universe’s expansion, gradual slowdown, and eventual contraction, which is of course not a subscription to the religious concept, but in his words, “a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas”.
“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.”
Carl Sagan – Cosmos
According to Hinduism, the reason why humanity goes through these numerous time cycles playing mute roles in God’s preordained cosmic dreams is to find the true nature of our reality. It says we should rise above the abstraction called thoughts, notice the illusory nature of the mind, and see the subject-object dualism to realize the ultimate truth.
I am not going to segue into philosophical highlights of non-duality because we’ve been through enough teachings, at least enough to know the major plotlines in that story. But what these existence stories are making me wonder is if the individual’s ability to transcend the mortal traps and awaken to the true nature doesn’t matter half as much as the collective ability of humanity to realize the same.
Humans are not individual entities groomed in isolation to ponder the big questions. We are a connected lot. We share a “collective consciousness”, a term coined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1893, which shows that diverse individuals always come together to form social groups based on common values, beliefs, ideas, and knowledge. In a purely non-philosophical sense, our collective consciousness is the shared manner in which we understand and interact with the world. We may think individually, but the contents of our thinking are a collaborative product of society.
On the other hand, in a purely philosophical sense, the entire universe is a single interconnected whole, where all phenomena are nothing but expressions of the same ultimate reality.
Both these viewpoints imply that human consciousness is like one big brain that thinks, exists, and evolves as a whole unit.
If so, can an individual have the experience of “self-realization”, which is supposed to be the closing act in our grand play, independent of the rest of humanity? We strive toward awakening to our true self through meditative practices and teachings, but if we are all parts of one collective whole, is it even possible for an individual, while he is still an “individual”, to realize the Self?
Then you might wonder, “What about the experience of someone like Ramana Maharshi? Isn’t he a realized being?”
Only an individual who thinks of himself as separate can think in terms of “I-need-to-realize-my-true-self”. Once he awakens to his true nature and merges with the indivisible Oneness, there is no one left to pat him on his back to say, “Yes!-I’ve-realized-my-Self”. The concept of Self-realization exists only from the viewpoint of those of us who are unrealized. We are the ones who label Ramana Maharshi as a realized soul. But for Ramana Maharshi, there is just no Ramana Maharshi.
So, if individuality is an illusion and in truth, all of humanity exists as one cosmic consciousness, is self-realization the true final destination of our journey or is it a holding dock for the enlightened individuals until all of humanity joins for the big upgrade? Are we assuming enlightenment as the endpoint in our saga or are there more levels beyond enlightenment that we just don’t know yet? Those who have tasted enlightenment but have to step back to live in the material world with us tell us that eternal silence is all there is. But what if they are unable to see beyond the Silence to confirm that that is all there is because they don’t have the weight of the rest of humanity with them to make that assertion?
